Renewables Projected To Add Triple The Capacity Of New Fossil Fuel Plants By 2030

The “world is already adding more renewable-energy capacity each year than fossil fuel capacity,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) explained earlier this year. And BNEF’s just-released 2030 Market Outlook projects that disparity will skyrocket, concluding that “renewable energy may reap as much as two-thirds of the $7.7 trillion in investment forecast for building new power plants by 2030 as declining costs make it more competitive with fossil fuels.”

That means some $5 trillion in renewable investment over the next decade and a half. Of the 5 terawatts (5000 gigawatts) of generating capacity that will be added worldwide over the next 15 years, over 3 TW (3000 GW) are projected by BNEF to come from renewables. The capacity of plants powered by fossil fuels — coal, gas and oil — will account for under 1100 gigawatts.

Here is a chart from Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder (and former CEO) Michael Liebreich:

BNEF explains that since the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and fossil fuel plants don’t run non-stop, “the capacity factor for U.S. renewables is about 34 percent, compared with a capacity factor of 64 percent for coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.” On the other hand, “In coming years that distinction will matter less, as new renewable generation outpaces new fossil-fuel generation by a wide margin” — by over 7-to-1 in 2030 according to the chart above.

Another recent study from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) underscores how low the cost of this transition really is. Researchers found that the cost of rapidly expanding U.S. renewable power in recent years (due in large part to state Renewable Portfolio Standards) “was less than 1 percent of retail electricity rates on average.”

And that cost differential continues to shrink as renewables like wind and solar keep coming down the learning curve, shedding costs over 99 percent since 1977.

For more on the reasons behind the recent success of renewable energy, here’s a great video by Peter Sinclair, climate decrocker and award-winning graphic artist, illustrator, and animator:

So both wind and solar are “within striking distance” of being competitive worldwide unsubsidized, according to Liebreich. The result, he explained is that, “What we are seeing is global CO2 emissions on track to stop growing by the end of next decade, with the peak only pushed back because of fast-growing developing countries, which continue adding fossil fuel capacity as well as renewables.”

The bad news is this renewables Renaissance won’t be enough to stop catastrophic climate change by itself. That’s because as the International Energy Agency, among others, has explained many times, the fossil fuel infrastructure built by the year 2017 will, by itself use up the entire carbon budget needed to stay below 2°C (3.6°F).

The only way to avoid blowing past multiple dangerous irreversible thresholds would be to actually start retiring fossil fuel plants before they reach the end of their lifetime, which is to say, before they are allowed to destroy a livable climate. And that will in general require the kind of moderate and rising carbon price that almost everyone but Tea-Party-driven conservatives supports — including former Treasury Secretaries from the Bush administration.

The notion that pushing R&D alone could possibly avert multiple catastrophes has been demolished by essentially every major study ever done on the subject, including this new one from BNEF.

Unfortunately for humanity, the so called “renewable energy” industry and its adherents are far better at producing soothsaying than they are at producing energy.How many years, exactly, have we been hearing about how so called “renewable energy” will save us? How many years in the last century has the amount of carbon dioxide beening indiscrimately dumped into the atomsphere decreased rather than increased? Two dangerous fossil fuel burning hellholes buying heavily into the renewable fantasy, California and Germany, have increasedthe amount of dangerous fossil fuel waste they’ve dumped in each of the last several years. In the former case, all of the wind and solar plants in the entire state can’t produce as much energy as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant produces – cleanly, safely, without a single loss of life, despite paranoid nearly insane predictions to the contrary – in a single building.After half a century of similar predictions of “by 2030” or “by 2000” (Amory Lovins, 1976) or “by 2100” and “by 2050” (Greenpeace), the portion of the renewable energy industry represented by the solar and wind industries doesn’t even produce 5 of the 540 exajoules humanity consumes each year. At no time in history has the entire wind and solar industry been able to produce as much energy as is represented by the annual increase in the use of dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped indiscriminately into the planetary atmosphere.And, of course, the liars in that same industry keep engaging, ever more transparently thankfully, in the fraudulent claim that peak capapcity is a meaningful metric for notoriously unreliable systems that solar and wind represent. And I note, that the evidence that the lifetime of this toxic stuff is short, so that it’s very possible that most or all of the wind and solar plants built in 2000 will be landfill – toxic landfill – in 2030.What is tragic is the vast amounts of money that have been transferred to the rich from the poor using this shell game of wishful thinking.Meanwhile, at Mauna Loa, the carbon dioxide readings remained firmly above 400 pm all through May and June.Heckuva job, anti-nukes. You must be very, very, very, very, very proud.

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Todd Flach

July 4, 2014 07:04

Hi N Nadir, your impatience with the rate of change is a virtue, but blaming the problems of nuclear on renewables is not. The nuclear industry needs to focus on self-improvement. We all know what they need to get better at. But it is true that they are racing against a range of other energy technologies which by every imagineable indicator appear to be accelerating in a positive way, while nuclear is very slowly rolling out some new solutions. Simply hanging on to the fleet of legacy gen-1 reactors as long as possible is NOT going make the nuclear industry competitive in the future. It must innovate itself into a position of compelling competitiveness or watch as renewables, energy efficiency, storage and load management take over.And while we are at it, please do update your data on fossil fuel use for Q1 2014 in Germany and California, renewables production, the lifetimes of PV panels and their recycling at end-of-life. You are quoting old and obsolete data and making incorrect connections bewteen cause and effect. This does not help your credibility. Germany has in fact reduced its fossil fuel use in Q1 2014 compared to 2013, while significantly increasing renewables production. Please remember that Germany is the number one industrial productive and exporting country (per capita) of all the major countries. Their energy policy has in no way reduced this position, and it might argued that their energy policy has helped it.California, Arizona, Nevada Utah and parts of Oregon are experiencing a record drought, and hydropower production in the region is collapsing. This is being made up by both PV, wind, natural gas and imported fossil fuel power. Without the PV and wind California now has, even more natural gas and imported ff power would be required. The solution to their problems can hardly be more thermal power that requires direct access to copious volumes of cooling water, a large fraction of which would evaporate when being used to cool their steam cycles.

“The only way to avoid blowing past multiple dangerous irreversible thresholds would be to actually start retiring fossil fuel plants before they reach the end of their lifetime, which is to say, before they are allowed to destroy a livable climate. And that will in general require the kind of moderate and rising carbon price that almost everyone but Tea-Party-driven conservatives supports — including former Treasury Secretaries from the Bush administration.”This is the most puzzling paragraph in the piece, which is otherwise reasonably informative.What we have witnessed in the past half century is that the environmental movement has been shockingly successfull in causing the closure of nuclear power plants before their end-of-life. In some cases they even succeeded in causing fully commissioned plants to be scrapped before they provided even a single cheap and clean kWh. Most of those closed plants were replaced with coal-burners, sometimes using the very steam turbines that were meant to be powered with nuclear heat. They managed to do this without a shred of objective evidence that what they were doing was in any way beneficial for the environment. They succeeded on the strength of rabid determination alone.So it would seem that similar success could be achieved if they transferred their attention from attacking nuclear power generation, to attacking fossil fuel power generation. The question is whether they will? Is fighting climate change as opposed to fighting nuclear power not a worthy goal? Will the environmental movement consider stopping its crusade against nuclear power and start crusading against fossil fuels with the same dogged determination? If not, why not? It seems such a no-brainer…

My question here, and I did not see it answered in the BNEF link, is what the projected overall energy demand? These projections hinge on that variable.I cheer the success of renewables, but capacity growth is less important than productivity growth. Renewables, due to their lower capacity factor, need much higher capacity to match the productivity of fossils and nuclear. baseload fossil power plants are designed to run at high capacity while peaker plants are intended to run intermittently. The peaker plants are obviously more expensive and it is in this market segment that renewables are more competitive (particularly solar), but that is not where the bulk of the emissions are coming from.

With increased wind+solar installed capacities, wind+solar will produce 100% of all electricity needed more often and longer when the wind blows and/or the sun shines.The owners will not switch off their wind turbines & solar panels unless the electricity price gets <$1/MWh, as their variable costs are near zero (assuming unsubsidized environment).But the variable costs of baseload (nuclear) plants are >$10/MWh, so those then have to sell their produced electricity below their variable costs… So, if the baseload plant cannot regulate down to near zero, the plant will make great losses during low wholesale price periods. And those get longer as more wind+solar is installed.Hence those baseoload plants can no longer compete in a market with subantial share of wind+solar.It was already predicted in the nineties by German studies.You can see the first signs now already. E.on will close the Grafenrheinfeld NPP (1.3GW) next spring already, while they have the license to operate it until the end of 2015. Next baseload plants will follow with increasing share of wind+solar.

Only nuclear power could ever desalinate the amount of water we will need. WE must focus to develop and deploy a global fleet of high temp reactors based upon the grand vision proven possible by Mr. Weinberg. Nothing else even comes close to the vast energy required to power all the needs, wants, mobility, infrastructure creation, AND the need to isolate excess CO2 (much less, make trilions of energy “expensive” solar cells and millions of wind turbines) for TEN BILLION PEOPLE.Energy is the foundation to all things… let’s not squander “all things” on just a few renewable energy parts. Do you know how many thousands of square miles of solar the world will need to actually displace 90% of the fossil fuels? I do, and most environmentalists think that vast amount is “unacceptable” because most environmentalists already have their share of (predominatety fossil fueled) power sources and would rather NOT see their source as the litter the fossil fueled industry historically calls it (yes, many enviro’s are against desert solar as well).I believe that large renewable growth figure does not account for the fact that renewables will have to be replaced on the order of THREE times as often than fossil fueled plants and the fact that much of that investment will have to also be spent on storage to account for the piss poor capacity factors. Anything less than100x RE development (and the continuous recycling and re-installations) is not adequate!Personally, I like solar and wind, but let’s be reasonable and not expect them to power everything a growing planetary civilization will require. Let us focus our primary objective on the intrinsically least expensive, most abundant source as demonstrated by Alvin.Unlike Al Gore, he was one of the first to both see the problem and offer a real, scientific solution!

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NNadir

July 6, 2014 17:53

Give. Me. A. Break.If…if…if…the trillion dollar renewables energy industry can ever produce as much energy as Generation I nuclear reactors, if it ever causes the elimination of the burning of an equal quantity of dangerous fossil fuels as the nuclear industry has, you will have a right to give advice to the nuclear industry about alleged “performance issues.”As it is, you seek to deflect the moral responsibility of sucking up a trillion dollars of precious resources, by claiming – and the so called “renewable energy” industry repeats this bull decade after decade – that the newest and latest data contravenes the last 50 years. Bull. Prove it. Typically, you provide no references for your handwaving claim, other than your own assurance that you are credible and I am not. I note that a transitory existence of one quarter of reasonable performance does not negate the reality of 100 quarters preceding it. It’s the same old horse manure that the renewables advocates are always handing out, some trash like “Germany produces 75% of its electricity by renewable energy,” on some particular friday in some particular summer week, while never paying a whit of heed to the days that it produces 1% of the energy, or 0% of the energy.Really? The latest data shows a grand success? How about you list all of the new coal plants that Germany is cancelling as a result of this data? How about you and your German friends announce that the coal plant at Weisweiller is being shut because solar and wind are so great?http://www.carma.org/plant/detail/49187I don’t expect to be accorded with “credibility” by anyone defending the renewables disgrace, since they seem to have a very, very, very, very difficult time understanding what credibility is. Credibility would involve producing tens of exajoules of clean energy for the expenditure of the vast sums of money the bourgeois consumers in the “renewables will save us” scam have consumed. It would involve showing progress in reduction of the rate of increase of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.How often do you check the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory for the latest data? I check it every week. I assure you humanity is losing, not winning.From reading this bull you offer about cooling water, I would suggest that you open a very basic engineering text book and learn how power plants work. No one on the planet thinks that Germany is cancelling coal plants, and the renewable energy industry would die in a New York minute without access to dangerous natural gas. Now it happens that the value of a dangerous natural gas combined cycle plant is essentially destroyed – in the combined cycle sense – by the need to shut it down and turn it back on repeatedly every time a clould passes away from or over a toxic array of solar cells, just as it is true that a coal plant is spectacularly less efficient when it is forced to feather up and down simply because the wind is blowing for two hours. If you want to know about how this is, a very simple experiment would involve trying to boil water while turning the gas off over regular intervals to approach boiling and determining whether this involves burning more or less gas than simply leaving the gas on.As far I am concerned, the “credibility” of the so called “renewable energy” industry is all wrapped up in the fact that every damn anti-nuke in that bourgeois squad of wishful thinkers hawking solar and wind garbage is working to entrench the gas and coal industries.There are no countries on the face of this planet that have phased out any dangerous fossil fuel using wind and solar, and no countries that plan to do so. As for nuclear power plant design, there are zero anti-nukes who know anything at all about the topic. They simply circulate sound bites among one another in a grand circle of misinformation and ignorance.In his seminal book written shortly before he died, Alvin Weinberg, former head of ORNL, wrote of the “First Nuclear Era,” describing an era of creativity that no one who is ignorant of the basic tenets of nuclear engineering can possibly comprehend. Only a tiny subset of possible reactors have been built, and a smaller subset have been commercialized. With a little more sense we might have been at the dawn of a new age of strength and achievement; but instead find ourselves hashing out insipid 50 year old ideas as if they mattered.The willful destruction of the intellectual nuclear infrastructure, our nuclear engineering schools, our base of nuclear professionals, our nuclear manufacturing capability is one of the great crimes our generation has perpetuated against future generations. These infrastructures have been decimated in this country by fear and ignorance that was allowed to thrive as the general disrespect of engineering and science was allowed to entrench itself. The mere fact that huge tracts of land have been trashed in subservience to the “renewables” fantasy is a reflection of that intellectual decline.Now the only hope for humanity lies in Asia in Asian nuclear infrastructure. Congratulations. You now live in a nation of bean counters even though you were born into a nation of first class scientists and engineers, a nation that built rather than whined.The fact that we are blowing apart the bedrock under a huge section of this continent to obscure the failure of the renewables industry is something with which all future generations will need to live.Excuse me if I regard your smug handwaving assurances and “advice” to the nuclear industry – an industry which you give no evidence of knowing anything about – as an emetic.I hope you have had a happy Fourth.